Let My People Go isn’t some polite meditation on mortality. This is Astrid Bas standing in a room and saying: here are two women who made extraordinary things and then they were gone. One chose to go. One had that choice ripped away from her in the most obscene way human beings have ever devised.
Sarah Kane writing plays that made audiences walk out because they couldn’t handle what she was showing them about violence and love and the impossibility of connection. Charlotte Salomon painting over 700 gouaches while the world was actively trying to erase her and everyone like her from existence. And then…nothing.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-six.
What Astrid does here, and this is where it gets under your skin, is she doesn’t try to explain it or make it comfortable or wrap it up in some redemptive narrative bullshit. She just puts their words, their images, their courage up against the reality that they’re gone. The movement, the text, the video, it’s not healing. It’s not cathartic. It’s just there, like a wound that won’t close because maybe it shouldn’t.
You watch this and you think about all the art that was never made, all the plays Kane didn’t write, all the paintings Salomon didn’t paint. You think about the unfairness of it, not in some abstract way, but in your gut where it actually matters. And Astrid doesn’t let you look away from that. She honors them by not prettifying it.
This is what art should do when it looks at death: it should refuse to make it easier than it is.